Scorers Have Been Silent, but Blackhawks Remain Confident

CHICAGO — During Jonathan Toews’s first N.H.L. postseason in 2009, the Blackhawks lost the opening game of their Western Conference semifinal against Vancouver.

“All of a sudden, that thought crosses your mind that, I guess, ‘Better luck next year and that’s the way it’s going to go,’ ” Toews said.

Two nights later, the Blackhawks won to even the series.

“You get the feeling that you’re going all the way to the Cup and nothing can stop you,” Toews said.

Toews is 27 now and the captain of the Blackhawks. He no longer expends as much emotional energy between games. Chasing his third Stanley Cup in six seasons, he is mature enough to recognize that nothing is ever as good as it seems. Or as bad.

That counsel is particularly instructive at this juncture of the Stanley Cup finals, which the Tampa Bay Lightning lead, two games to one. Toews has yet to score, and neither has Chicago’s other best offensive player, Patrick Kane. Stymied by Tampa Bay’s speed in the neutral zone, they have combined for one point, an assist from Toews in Game 2.

Asked Tuesday if the Blackhawks could win the series if that trend continued, Toews paused for a few seconds before answering.

“Sure,” he said.

Then he elaborated.

“I think the two of us always feel that expectation, or that pressure, to contribute offensively,” he said. “But we’ve got a lot of guys who can do it. As long as we’re playing smart, two-way hockey and we’re creating and bringing in energy, eventually something’s got to tip.”

That perspective is endorsed by Coach Joel Quenneville, who has overseen their development — Kane morphing into an elite and creative scorer, Toews emerging as perhaps the best two-way player in the league — over the past seven seasons. Only once during that time, across 19 previous postseason series — the first round in 2013, when the Blackhawks clobbered Minnesota in five games — has neither player scored. Chicago went on to win the Cup that year, when it teamed for 12 goals and 26 points during the rest of the playoffs.

The last time Kane was held without a point in the first three games of a series, he erupted for two goals and eight assists over the next four, in the 2014 conference finals against the Los Angeles Kings. The year before against the Kings, Kane registered one assist in the first three games before scoring four goals, including the hat-trick-capping series clincher in double overtime, in the next two.

“We’re going to need our top guys to be productive,” Quenneville said. “Like we always say, we don’t care who scores for our team. But they usually lead the charge.”

Even for players of their caliber, going three games without scoring is common. During the regular season, Toews endured 10 goalless stretches of that length — including one of 11 games — while Kane, who missed seven weeks with a broken collarbone, had five.

What magnifies their output, beyond the supercharged setting of the finals, is that the Blackhawks’ other primary scorers have also struggled. Marian Hossa, Brandon Saad and Patrick Sharp have teamed for one goal, by Saad in the third period Monday. Even though Steven Stamkos, whose 43 goals ranked second in the N.H.L., has not scored this series, either, the Lightning have received superb production from everyone else. Every member of the so-called Triplets — Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Nikita Kucherov — has scored, while Ryan Callahan, the third-line right wing, leads the team with four points.

“We want to shut down their guys, and they want to shut down ours,” said Lightning left wing Brenden Morrow. “It’s kind of fallen on the shoulders of some secondary guys that stepped up in a big way.”

Morrow was alluding to the phenomenon common at this time of year, when teams deploy certain players to neutralize their foe’s stars. It is how third-line centers, like Tampa Bay’s Cedric Paquette and Chicago’s Antoine Vermette, come to score critical goals, while players like Kane can be held without a shot on goal, as was the case in Game 2.

To combat this, to ensure that either Kane or Toews would not have to contend with the smothering defensive pairing of Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman or the line centered by the pesky Paquette, Quenneville has separated them.

Their status — are they playing together or not? — has been a source of tremendous fascination, and angst, and the ferocity with which the subject has been discussed bordered on obsessive. It has even spawned a nickname: the nuclear option.

Kane and Toews began their careers by playing on the same line regularly. Then they did not. Then they did. Then they did not. Quenneville reunited them late in Game 5 of the conference finals against Anaheim, and the Blackhawks responded by winning the next two, including Game 7, in which Toews scored two goals and Kane had three assists. Searching for scoring balance, Quenneville split them late in Game 2 of the finals.

“We usually do things when we don’t like the way things are going, or we don’t like the results,” Quenneville said. “That can lead us to try things.”

Judging by Chicago’s success, many of those things tend to work: In playoff Games 4 through 7 under Quenneville, it is 40-14, including 23-6 during the past three years. That experience has been valuable for Toews.

“As far as scoring goals and contributing the way I know I can, yeah, it’s frustrating, it’s tough when it doesn’t happen,” Toews said. “But you just keep going and have confidence that eventually something will happen and work out in your favor.”

Correction:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about the lack of scoring from Chicago Blackhawks stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in the first three games of the Stanley Cup finals referred incorrectly to Toews’s season in 2009, when Chicago lost the opening game of the Western Conference semifinals against the Vancouver Canucks. It was his first N.H.L. postseason, not his rookie season in the league. (He was a rookie the previous season.)

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Chicago Upbeat as Scorers Struggle. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe